Ethan Stewart
Ethan Paul Stewart, ex-mercenary, was the crime lord of Dead Man's Rock, a world too far from the Terran Dominion to attract its attention.Golden, Christie. StarCraft: The Dark Templar Saga: Firstborn. Pocket Star Books, May 2007. ISBN 0-7434-7125-3. Stewart is very intelligent, although not strictly in the "bookish sense". He is very disciplined, which he calls "knowing what you want", and his body is as disciplined as his mind. Ever since he was a child, Stewart had known what he wanted, and pursued it with a single-mindedness of purpose that stunned his allies and devastated his enemies. History Stewart met Rosemary Dahl, a fellow mercenary, in a drug den on the outlying world of Dead Man's Rock, nine years before the events of StarCraft: The Dark Templar Saga: Firstborn. He helped her overcome her addiction to stims and became her employer and lover. Seven years later he decided to leave the mercenary business and become a crime lord on that world, which meant he couldn't be around Dahl all the time (she was still conducting missions), but they still kept in contact. Stewart "sold out" to the Dominion, creating a business relationship with the heir to the throne of the Dominion, Valerian Mengsk. The details of their arrangement are unknown, but Stewart made a great deal of money from it. He claimed that he legitimately found a source of extremely pure Vespene gas when asked about his wealth. However, the arrangement had a downside as well; if Stewart didn't do what Valerian Mengsk asked, he would be killed. The Dominion was more than powerful enough to crush a crime lord like Stewart. On the world of Nemaka, Rosemary Dahl guarded an archaeological expedition seeking the secrets of a strange artifact. The team was led by Jacob Ramsey, a maverick archaeologist in the employ of Valerian Mengsk. Ramsey discovered a secret in the artifact which overloaded his mind and literally rewired his brain. Valerian Mengsk intended to ship the barely-recovered Ramsey to a safe haven where Ghosts would probe his mind and take from it everything of value, and then Ramsey would be killed. However, Ramsey's powers turned out to be stronger than expected; he and Dahl escaped the custody of the Marines. Dahl, the more streetwise of the two, decided to head to Dead Man's Rock and hide out with Ethan Stewart. She did not know of his special arrangement. Valerian Mengsk ordered Stewart to send Jacob Ramsey and Rosemary Dahl to him. He would have Ghosts probe their minds and then would arrange for Ramsey's death. Valerian Mengsk promised Dahl would undergo "neural resocialization" to hide her memories of the interrogation. Stewart didn't want anything to happen to Dahl, and indeed didn't even believe Mengsk (despite nearly convincing himself that Dahl would survive), but had no choice in the matter. Screening Suspicion Stewart was given a rough summary of Ramsey's abilities, and made sure to protect himself. He had been trained by Dr. Reginald Morris, a former employee of the Ghost program, to use a psi-screen, a device to protect his mind from telepaths, which Valerian Mengsk had delivered to him as a gift. He hid the screen under a wig so expertly that his lover, Rosemary Dahl, never suspected a thing. He used the psi-screen to prevent Ramsey from reading his mind. Stewart even learned to control his external thoughts and "leak" them through the screen, which meant that Stewart wouldn't just detect a void (and become suspicious), but would instead read whatever Stewart wanted him to read. He also seems to have learned much about the workings of the human mind. Stewart trained in a set of caverns under his headquarters. Stewart allowed Ramsey to read "cold-hearted" thoughts that Ramsey would expect a crime lord to logically have. Stewart would have used Ramsey as his own personal mind-reader, if he had the chance, so he allowed Ramsey to read that. He also let him feel his love (or something close to it) for Rosemary Dahl. Ramsey knew he couldn't stay with Stewart for long because the thoughts he was allowed to read frightened him. Stewart couldn't have had a complete knowledge of Ramsey's abilities, however, which would lead to his downfall. Ramsey and his "Protoss-in-his head", Zamara, experimented with the Khala, the psionic link that all Protoss shared. Using the link, they were able to read Stewart's real thoughts, and discovered that he was selling them to Valerian Mengsk. Ramsey managed to convince Dahl to hack into Stewart's communication network, finding records of conversations between Stewart and Valerian Mengsk. Dahl pretended not to know about Stewart's betrayal. She shut down cameras in strategic areas then pretended to seduce Stewart. Once she and Ramsey were close enough, she attacked him, shooting him in the arm and taking him hostage. He tried to convince her to run away with him, but Stewart used his new mind-reading abilities to scan his mind and inform Dahl of the deception. Dahl used Stewart to evade security, intending on escaping Dead Man's Rock with a ship she would steal from Stewart's spaceship hangar. Unfortunately, Stewart's steward, Phillip Randall figured out what she was doing and ambushed Dahl and Ramsey. During the ensuing battle, Zamara and Ramsey killed Randall while Dahl shot her former lover (before Valerian Mengsk could get to him). The two fugitives then escaped. Stewart was very badly injured; he underwent six hours of surgery before the doctor noticed his psi-screen. She did not know how long he had been wearing it before, and decided to remove it to spare him any (more) possibly memory loss or brain damage. Shortly afterwards, a small number of Zerg stormed his fortress, and a Hydralisk spat a strange gooey substance on him, wrapping him in a web-like cocoon.Golden, Christie. StarCraft: The Dark Templar Saga #2: Shadow Hunters. Pocket Star Books, November 27, 2007. ISBN 0-7434-7126-1. Infestation Stewart was brought before Kerrigan, and after some time hatched as an Infested Terran with four limbs and power comparable to Kerrigan herself, although he lacked the same psionic powers. Kerrigan sent Stewart to Aiur to retrieve Ramsey and Dahl, but his Zerg were forced to ally with the Protoss and the Dominion to combat Ulrezaj, culminating in a massive psionic storm from the Protoss which injured but did not kill Stewart. References Stewart Stewart